I pass to critical seventeen: The ghost of that terrible wedding scene, When an elderly colonel stole my queen, And woke my dream of heaven: No school-girl decked in her nursery curls Was my gushing innocent queen of pearls; If she wasn't a girl of a thousand girls. She was one of forty-seven! I see the ghost of my first cigar-- Of the thence-arising family jar-- Of my maiden brief (I was at the Bar), When I called the judge "Your wushup"! Of reckless days and reckless nights, With wrenched-off knockers, extinguished lights, Unholy songs, and tipsy fights, Which I strove in vain to hush up. Ghosts of fraudulent joint-stock banks, Ghosts of copy, "declined with thanks," Of novels returned in endless ranks, And thousands more, I suffer. The only line to fitly grace My humble tomb, when I've run my race, Is "Reader, this is the resting-place Of an unsuccessful duffer." I've fought them all, these ghosts of mine, But the weapons I've used are sighs and brine, And now that I'm nearly forty-nine, Old age is my only bogy; For my hair is thinning away at the crown, And the silver fights with the worn-out brown; And a general verdict sets me down As an irreclaimable fogy. [Illustration] THE MODERN MAJOR-GENERAL I am the very pattern of a modern Major-Gineral, I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral; I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical; I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical, I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical; About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news, With interesting facts about the square of the hypotenuse. I'm very good at integral and differential calculus, I know the scientific names of beings animalculous. In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-Gineral. I know our mythic history--KING ARTHUR'S and SIR CARADOC'S, I answer hard acrostics, I've a pretty taste for paradox; I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of HELIOGABALUS, In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous. I tell undoubted RAPHAELS from GERARD DOWS and ZOFFANIES, I know the croaking chorus from the "Frogs" of ARISTOPHANES; Then I can hum a fugue, of which I've heard the music's din afore, And whistle all the airs from that confounded nonsense "Pinafore." Then I can write a washing-bill in Babylonic cuneiform, And tell you every detail of CARACTACUS'S uniform. In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral, I am the very model of a modern Major-Gineral.